U.S. Satellites, Ammo Aided Saudis in Border War

Even after expressing alarm about civilians being killed in Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s war last year against Shiite separatists in Yemen, the U.S. provided the Saudis with crucial military aid, including ammunition and satellite imagery, the WikiLeaks document trove shows.

While earlier cables indicated that the Yemenis had diverted U.S. counterterrorism assistance to fight the Houthis, direct American support to the Saudis’ role in the fight has been obscure. But in a December 2009 cable WikiLeaks released today, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James B. Smith, described supplying Riyadh with “stocks of ammunition for small weapons and artillery.” He would later approve using U.S. satellites to target the Yemeni rebels near Saudi Arabia’s southern border.

Strikingly, Smith held few illusions about the Saudi war, calling it a “massively disproportionate” fight against lightly-armed separatists who were subjected to “day and night aerial bombardment and artillery shelling.” (Including, apparently, U.S. artillery.) The Saudis waged an “embarrassingly long campaign that was poorly planned and executed,” and they railed against what they considered U.S. intransigence over the “emergency provision of munitions, imagery and intelligence,” something Smith chalks up to bureaucratic delays.

But that wasn’t the end of the U.S.’s undisclosed contributions to the border war. And it was more than just bureaucratic inertia that stopped the U.S. from sharing its eyes in the sky with the Saudis — for a time. In February 2010, disturbed by the imprecision of Saudi air strikes on Houthi targets — in particular, one that hit a “Yemeni medical clinic” — Smith told a Saudi defense official that the U.S. had concerns about “providing Saudi Arabia with satellite imagery of the Yemen border area absent greater certainty that Saudi Arabia was and would remain fully in compliance with the laws of armed conflict.”

The defense official, Prince Khaled bin Sultan, used Smith’s discomfort to his advantage. “[I]f we had the Predator,” Smith quotes bin Sultan as saying, “maybe we would not have this problem.” Bin Sultan conceded that a joint Yemeni-Saudi military committee that picked the targets “possibly” made mistakes that led to civilians dying.

There’s no reference to the U.S. giving the Saudis the same drones it uses for missile strikes on suspected al-Qaeda positions in Pakistan. But Smith ultimately relented on providing the satellite imagery, noting that bin Sultan was neither “defensive nor invasive” about the civilian deaths. “Based on these assurances, the ambassador has approved… the provision of [U.S. government] imagery of the Yemeni border area to the Saudi Government,” the February cable reads. Although the war on the Houthis was petering out, the imagery could enhance “Saudi capabilities against Al-Qaeda activities in this area.”

But some press reports specifically claimed that the U.S. refused to give the Saudis satellite data. In November, David Ignatius reported in his Washington Post column that the State Department nixed the Saudi imagery-sharing request, fearing that intervention in the conflict “could violate the laws of war.” Instead, he wrote, citing Saudi officials, Riyadh relied on French satellites to spot Houthi positions.

Knickmeyer writes that the U.S. needs to be “disciplined” against interfering in Yemen’s civil war. Too late. The aid the U.S. gave to Yemen was diverted to the Houthi fight; the aid it gave to the Saudis was specifically intended for it. And in any case, both countries are getting big new packages of U.S. military assistance: the Yemenis will receive $1.2 billion while the Saudis are getting a massive $60 billion worth of fighter jets, helicopters, missiles and radar tech. And it doesn’t seem like anyone’s asking any questions about the Houthis this time.